On Re-discovering Yoga

I did most of my schooling in a government school, where I had mandatory yoga classes as part of my syllabus for a few years.

Looking back now, it seems quaint. Who thought that kids would find yoga interesting? How did it get into the syllabus? Were there no left-liberals back then to protest its inclusion? Or was yoga seen as secular back then? I have no idea.

In my school, all non-academic subjects (Art, SUPW, Yoga) had classrooms of their room. The yoga teacher had a large and airy room to himself in what was called the Science block. We had yoga classes twice a week, and we would form our lines and go to the yoga room in crocodile fashion. The yoga room had a wooden desk and a wooden chair for the teacher, and coarse and ratty red carpets for the students to sit on in long lines. We had to leave our shoes outside the room,  and of course the boys had to sit on one side and the girls on the other.

Our yoga teacher was quite a specimen. He was tall and thin and pale yellow and almost bald. He had a voice that was one notch above Mute, and an air of otherworldliness, as if most of him lived on some spiritual plane from where he could scarcely be bothered visiting us mere mortals. He was timid, and sometimes blinked furiously when trying to explain things. None of this, of course, helped him control a room full of noisy tweens and teens.

His name was Something-or-the-Other Potti, which should have made his nickname obvious. But give us government school kids some credit - we didn't go for obvious nicknames. We named him Kokk (stork), in honour of his elongated neck. Over the years, many generations of kids must have called him that, and he must certainly have been aware of the nickname. Some daring kid had even scrawled the name (KOK) on the dusty window panes in his class room. That scrawl remained remained there for many years - it may still be there for all I know.

Mr Potti (I will call him that at least now, twenty years later) had, at some point or the other in his long career, given up on ever passing on any of his knowledge to his students. And I think that was a very good call on his part. Not only was he temperamentally unsuited to the task, his chosen subject was one that held very little interest for a bunch of kids.

You see, twenty years ago, yoga didn't have the glamour that it has now. Today, yoga can come clad in lycra and spandex if you want it to. But back then -- well, if it was clad in anything at all, it was probably boring saffron. Mr Potti didn't help matters by sometimes trying to read spiritual stuff aloud to us from his books. I say "trying to", because his breathy voice didn't carry far, and unless you were in the front row, it was unlikely that you would hear anything at all.

The class would become silent each time he started reading aloud. Gradually it would become clear that there was no point in listening because you could hear nothing anyway. And then one by one, the kids would start talking, until gradually the room would become so deafeningly loud that Mr Potti would break off from his reading and bang his arm on his wooden desk in ineffectual anger, and then we would become silent again. And on it would go. Yoga, in effect, was a free class for us, with very little actual practice.

I used to feel sorry for Mr Potti back then, I remember (even while calling him Kokk behind his back). But looking back now, I realize that it's probably because of those classes that I've always had an aversion to yoga. Even after it became fashionable, and everybody I knew was signing up for it, I stayed away, because I associated yoga with boredom and with being just a little bit pathetic.

But now, at long last, twenty years later, that curse has been broken. Thanks to an awesome app*, I've started doing yoga again, and it has been amazing. Yoga, I've discovered, need not be about spirituality. It can just be something you enjoy doing, something that challenges you, something that helps you understand your body better. Yoga can be accessible, it can be whatever you need it to be.

As for Mr Potti, I suppose he must have retired long ago. I hope more of his ex-students rediscover yoga and its life-changing benefits.

*The app is called Down Dog and it's available both on Google Play and App Store. I've been promoting it among all my friends like I'm being paid to do it, but unfortunately I'm not. :|

Diwali Night

As I type this,whooshes and explosions surround me on all sides.The windows periodically light up with different colours. Any non-Indian would probably think I'm in a war-zone. But it's just Diwali in Bangalore.

I didn't think much of Diwali when I was a kid. Unlike today, we didn't have too many varieties of fire-crackers back then. There were the the usual sparklers in white and red and green, and there were the chakrams (wheels) and the conical thing that goes whoosh into the air with a lot of light, I can't remember the name of it. If we were lucky, there would be one or two rockets, and a big red malappadakkam, which was scary. These would be saved till the end, and only one of the grown-ups was allowed to light them.

When we became a little older, we decided that crackers were for kids, and stopped pestering our parents to buy them. I think this was also the time the Sivakasi child labour aspect gained publicity, so that may have played a part. And so Diwali became just another holiday for us - no crackers or lights or anything. It helped that we Malayalis don't celebrate Diwali in any case. We have no puja or sweets associated with Diwali.

It wasn't until we moved to Delhi that I realized how big Diwali actually is as a festival. Our first Diwali there, we went up to the roof of the house to see the fireworks. Flowers of light bloomed all around us. Rockets went up into the sky with a whoosh and exploded. Below us, our neighbours lit sparklers wished each other. And then it hit me, in a way it had never hit me before, that the ENTIRE CITY was celebrating that night. Young and old, rich and poor, everybody could see and enjoy these lights.

I didn't think much of it back then, but apparently there is a reason that Malayalis don't celebrate Diwali. Somebody told me once that it's because Diwali is associated with Rama's victory over Ravana. Apparently we Malayalis identify more with Ravana than with Rama. But that didn't make much sense to me. Why would we identify with a Sri Lankan king?

The story I heard recently makes more sense. Apparently, Vamana vanquished our beloved King Mahabali on Diwali day. For us, it's less about the victory of some North Indian king over some Sri Lankan king, and more about our own king being sent underground, poor guy.

But Diwali seems to be spreading south as well, if how Bangalore is tonight is any indication. Maybe it's the number of North Indians here, or maybe it's the fact that it's such a fun festival, but Bangalore tonight reminds me of that first Diwali night in Delhi long ago.

The Real House

I learnt last month that the house that partly inspired this story has been demolished. An apartment building is going to come up in its place, each flat selling at the astronomical initial rate of Rs 5, 500 per square foot. Like dozens of other old houses in Trivandrum, this house too had become out-of-date, it couldn't live on in the new century, in the new Trivandrum.

(For those who've read the story, don't worry - the owner of the house, my grandmother's eldest sister, is not in the situation I've described in the story. She has five sons who take very good care of her.)

I couldn't help feeling a little sad about the house's demise, though I was never more than a casual visitor to the place. Somehow, despite never having spent too much time there, I have very clear memories of the house. But then, large houses are quite magical to young kids, especially when the adults are busy and the kids are left to their own devices. My brother and I have explored the large grounds, played hide-and-seek in the rooms, read books on the verandah.

I think the only occasion on which I spent a few days there at a stretch was during the monsoons of the year I was five. The house we were staying in at that time was on the banks of the Karamana Aar, and it flooded. Our house was in knee-deep water. To make matters worse, both my brother and I had chicken-pox. So we shifted to the grand-aunt's large house for a few days. Of course, I've also visited the house multiple times over the years I've spent in Trivandrum.

The house had a rare characteristic - two gates, one on either side, because the house was on a large plot between two roads. On one side, the road was much lower than the house, and steep steps led down to the gate. This gate was supposed to be the front entrance of the house, but later on, when cars became more common, the back gate of the house was more frequently used. The front gate was locked pretty much all the time. I remember my brother and used to find the moss-covered steps leading down to the front gate spooky - we rarely played there.

My grandmother's father built the house for his eldest daughter after she got married. So it can't be more than fifty or sixty years old, because she got married in the late forties. The rooms are not as small and dark as rooms in older Kerala houses generally are. They have high ceilings, large windows, cold red floors. Somehow, despite being so large, the house always seemed very warm and welcoming to me. I don't know if it was the house itself, or the warmth of the people who lived there.

I find it so weird that the house now lives on only in the memories of the people who lived there and visited there. Also, if I feel so sad about the house's demolition, I wonder how the five sons of my great-aunt must feel - they grew up there.

But I guess time has to pass, and the world has to change.

Goodbye, Google Reader!

Because tomorrow, you're dead. Your parents, who once swore to do no evil, are now killing you off. They're being the Big Bad Corporate they once swore not to be, and they're being merciless with you and with all of us who love you.

But wait - this post is not going to be a whine-post. This is going to be a happy celebratory post, about all the good times we've shared, and all the laughs we've had.

I don't remember who introduced us, or even when we first met. I know it's been at least six years, because you were with me when I moved to Jamshedpur in 2007. So that's a long time, Reader. I know there must be millions of others who've known you longer, and who've even spent more time with you than I have. But that doesn't matter to me. You occupy a special place in MY heart. 

I'm going to miss your white-and-blue face. I'm going to miss how simple you were to navigate. I'm going to miss how you used to let me decide what to read rather than try to figure it out on your own. I'm going to miss always having at least one Chrome tab showing those comforting blue and red squares. I'm going to miss periodically making Resolutions to read more intellectual stuff, and then guiltily lapsing back to the fun stuff. 

There was a time my favourite thing about you was the 'Like' option. I used to obsessively check how many 'likes' my posts had got, how many shares. But your parents stripped you of that in an attempt to promote their other, more colourful, more swashbuckling younger child, Plus. I should have realized then, of course, that the end was near, that it was only a matter of time before they decided to do away with you completely.

But you know what they say about how evil begets evil? I hope and suspect that that'll be true in this case. I don't think Plus will ever be loved as much as you were, Reader. They're shoving Plus down our throats in a way that'll just make us choke on it. 

Whereas you grew on us, you made us love you with your simplicity and your gentleness. You didn't mind when we were too busy for you. You waited for us to come back to you, as we all eventually did. You didn't wave periodically at us from Gmail and Blogger and every other Google site we use, the way Plus is doing today. You were patient, and you were laid-back, and you were nice. For me, you  represent an older and nicer Internet, and maybe an older and nicer Google. 

We love you, Reader. And we're going to miss you. 

Mango Season

My Ammoomma was born in the late thirties, in a village in what is now Pathanamthitta district of Kerala. She was the seventh of eleven brothers and sisters. Her father worked as a doctor in the local hospital, and they all lived in a big house near the temple. Acres and acres of their land surrounded the house, and the family was considered quite wealthy.
The house was sold off long ago, converted into a resort for the rich and the rootless. But Ammomma often reminisces about those times. The amount of rice the house used to consume in one day, the number of servants they used to have, how the children all used to sit on the dining room floor in one long row for lunch, how the girls used to go to school every day with so many roses in their hair that the other girls made fun of them. I like imagining her running around that big house, a little girl in a white petticoat, secure in her little village, while outside, in the big world that she knows nothing of, her country survives the final throes of a freedom movement, becomes independent, and takes its first tentative steps as a nation.
She says she likes talking about those times because they are gone forever. That way of living, it has quite disappeared. And the way we are today, it can never come again. Then again, that's also probably why I like listening to her stories. They're about a time that I can experience only through her words, by letting her stories play out in my mind against the backdrop of a house I can remember only sketchily.
One of the stories she told me recently was about the mangoes.
Their big house was surrounded by mango trees of all shapes and sizes. There was the one that produced long and thin mangoes; these mangoes were called 'kolan manga'. There was the mango tree that stood next to the broken well. Its mangoes were called 'pottakinaru manga', and were the sweetest of the lot. At the western end of the compound, two mango trees stood so close to each other that it seemed they must grow from the same base. But they produced two different types of mangoes! And then there was the poor tree whose mangoes nobody liked, because it stood right next to the refuse pit.
"In the mango season," she says, "Whenever there was a wind, PADA-PADA the managoes would fall. And all of us, the children, we would run out, and grab the mangoes. The ones we couldn't eat, we would give to Ammoomma. And she would decide what to do with them. Some she would keep for lunch. Some she would decide to pickle. And others, the ones that were slightly broken from the fall, would go into the big jar for the winter.  And at lunch, Appooppan would squeeze the essence of the mangoes and give each of us a big yellow ball of rice and curd and mango and salt. By the end of the squeezing, his hand used to become completely yellow!
"Even the servants used to pick up a few mangoes for their lunch. They used to eat enormous amounts of rice though, much more than us. There used to be a Muslim who used to come to chop wood - Thambi Metthan, he was called. That's what he used to do all day - just chop wood. And when we poured rice for him to eat, it used to be like a little white hill, so tall that his face was almost covered. And he would actually eat it all too!
The ground below each mango tree used to be littered with fallen mangoes, she says. And with flies feasting stickily on the mangoes. When you went near, they would rise into the air, a buzzing black cloud, but some would remain on the mangoes, too full to fly perhaps.
"What happened to all these mango trees?" I ask.
"Cut down, all of them, " she answers. "One by one."
"Why?"
"I don't know. Maybe they went bad. Trees do." Pause. "You know, it was the tree next to the refuse pit that survived longest. Nobody wanted its mangoes in the beginning, but it ended up being the most sought after. How times change!"

Tilonia

Those two years of my life are not ones that I think of with any kind of nostalgia. I was lost throughout, bent on drowning in self-doubt and self-pity. The shock of the new environment didn't help either, I suppose.

But there are bits of it that I wish I'd enjoyed more. There was that one week in rural Rajasthan, for example. It was a mandatory trip for all of us, the school's way of ensuring that the sons and daughters of the rich socialites of Delhi went to an Indian village at least once in their lives. I remember at the introduction session at school, the program leader asked, "So have any of you been to a village before?" One guy raised his hand and said, in all seriousness, "Yes ma'am, to Ambala." I rest my case.

I went for that trip knowing that I would be an outcast again - and I still don't know who to blame for that. All these years, I've blamed them - those snobbish teenagers who couldn't understand me and therefore didn't accept me or include me. But as the years have passed, and I've become more and more like them, I've stopped blaming them and started accepting that I was also partly a cause for my exclusion. We were just too different, them and me. Neither of us could have been expected to fit so easily into each others' lives.

But I was talking about that week. I was so hung up on the people and the politics and the exclusion that I simply forgot to enjoy the trip - or, indeed, learn from it. The place we went to was Tilonia - the Barefoot College. I've since studied the project as a case in a course on social entrepreneurship. It was only while doing research for a presentation that I realized that I'd actually been to the place! I hadn't even known what the project was actually called.

The funny thing is that I can still remember most of the trip itself. The first two days, we stayed in Tilonia and were taken around the campus. I remember solar heaters and rainwater harvesting and women's groups producing handicrafts and something called 'Kabaad se Jugaad' - making useful things out of waste materials. The days were hot and brown. There was dust in little spirals, and sporadic short green bushes. We would wake up early in the morning and queue up before the tap, shivering in the cold of the desert. And the rainwater would gush out from the tap, warm from the solar heating.

After the first couple of days, we were divided into three groups and taken to three separate villages. The village I went to was better than I'd expected it to be - it wasn't squalid or dirty for one thing. There was some sort of drought relief work going on - the women were digging a trench in return for the wages that they would normally be earning from agricultural activities in normal years. We tried to help them a little bit with their digging - they laughed at our pathetic attempts, of course.

My clearest memory from the entire trip is of a group trek we did one night. We walked from the village to a nearby temple, all of us. If only I could describe that trip in detail. It was dark all around - not a single streetlight, no reflected glow from buildings, just the billions of stars overhead. And really, no light was necessary because the starlight was so bright. We city dwellers don't realize how accustomed we are to artificial light. Even when the electricity goes off, there's usually some sort of light - reflected light from the house next door, the street light filtering in. But total and absolute absence of any light but that of the stars overhead - that's an experience!

I don't remember much about the temple itself. Just that we sat or lay under the trees outside. We were mostly quiet, even the shallowest, because of the sheer beauty of the spectacle above us. What can you do in such cases except stare upwards in mute and open-mouthed wonder? I remember thinking, despite the loneliness and the exclusion, that this was one experience I'd never forget. And I never have.